How to Determine the Most Efficient Design for Your Home

Design efficiency is often overlooked and not often discussed by buyers and builders. Over the years of home design and building I have had to review countless home designs to save on buildings to achieve budget targets. There are a few simple rules when undergoing this review which I have described below.
Saving wasted space
This is the simplest step for someone with a high level of spatial awareness. A brief overview of a floor plan will highlight areas larger than needed or excessive. Examples might be significant hall lengths, odd sized areas where rooms are not well connected or flowing or only large rooms. Last year a client came to me and showed me a house plan that he had designed through an architect named who has a master bedroom of 8.5 mx 3.0 m and the client did not identify the room as strange until I showed it. If you are accustomed to seeing architectural plans, the process is quite simple, but for most home buyers, it is very difficult to visualize the space just by looking at a scale image. A simpler way that I recommend to buyers is to take a blank piece of paper and cut the scale-sized furniture they have in their current home, then position it on the home design plan where they think it will go. This will then help them assess the proportion of room size in relation to their furniture.
Remove the excess cost of the technique
When designing and building two storey houses, the main factor in price efficiency is the cost of engineering. A large open space on the ground floor can cause engineers to increase the depth of suspended plates from 172mm to 257mm, which adds significant costs. Keeping enough structural walls under the slab in key … Read the rest